German student creates electromagnetic harvester that gathers free electricity from thin air

A German student has built an electromagnetic harvester that recharges an AA battery by soaking up ambient, environmental radiation. These harvesters can gather free electricity from just about anything, including overhead power lines, coffee machines, refrigerators, or even the emissions from your WiFi router or smartphone.

This might sound a bit like hocus-pocus pseudoscience, but the underlying science is actually surprisingly sound. We are, after all, just talking about wireless power transfer — just like the smartphones that are starting to ship with wireless charging tech, and the accompanying charging pads.

Dennis Siegel, of the University of Arts Bremen, does away with the charging pad, but the underlying tech is fundamentally the same. We don’t have the exact details — either because he doesn’t know (he may have worked with an electrical engineer), or because he wants to patent the idea first — but his basic description of “coils and high frequency diodes” tallies with how wireless power transfer works. In essence, every electrical device gives off electromagnetic radiation — and if that radiation passes across a coil of wire, an electrical current is produced. Siegel says he has produced two versions of the harvester: One for very low frequencies, such as the 50/60Hz signals from mains power — and another for megahertz (radio, GSM) and gigahertz (Bluetooth/WiFi) radiation.

The efficiency of wireless charging, however, strongly depends on the range and orientation of the transmitter, and how well the coil is tuned to the transmitter’s frequency. In Siegel’s case, “depending on the strength of the electromagnetic field,” his electromagnetic harvester can recharge one AA battery per day. He doesn’t specify, but presumably one-AA-per-day is when he’s sitting next to a huge power substation. It makes you wonder how long it would take to charge an AA battery via your coffee machine, or by leeching from your friend’s mobile phone call.

As a concept, though, Siegel’s electromagnetic harvester is very interesting. On its own, a single harvester might not be all that interesting — but what if you stuck a bunch of them, magnetically, to various devices all around your house? Or, perhaps more importantly, why not use these harvesters to power tiny devices that don’t require a lot of energy? Sensors, hearing aids (cochlear implants), smart devices around your home — they could all be powered by harvesting small amounts of energy from the environment.

One question does remain, though: How much ambient, wasted electromagnetic radiation is actually available? There are urban legends about people who install coils of wire in their garage, and then suck up large amounts of power from nearby power substations or radio transmitters. Would the power/radio company notice? Would it degrade the service for other people? Is this a likely plot for Die Hard 6: A better day to die hard?

Tagged In

I like this, its interesting nonetheless. If they could come up with a system to first shrink box to be even smaller, then come up with a way to transfer that power from one location to another without losing power. Then you could set it up on all the major power lines possibly and retrieve a ton of power. This could be very interesting, and I look forward to who picks it up and if it will actually become relevant in today’s society (which unfortunately, much incredibly interesting and useful technology doesn’t get this far and is lost in the valley of the lost awesome tech)

Mr E!

Tesla proved similar principles 100 years ago! This is just another variation. It is a totally different way to get power for free!

Think of it like this!

Just like radio and TV waves excess energy is being broadcasted all the time. Turning on additional TV sets in your home does not cause the TV transmitter station to draw more power to send the signal to your additional TV sets! They always transmit the same power rather 100 viewers or 100,000 viewers are watching! And the signal does not degrade!

YOU CAN TAP INTO THE EARTH’S ENERGY FIELD FOR FREE without stealing anything from the power company!

It’s not free!!! Read my post or look up how mutual inductance works. It’s really no different than tapping into to other power source directly and IT’S ILLEGAL! It’s stealing electricity plain and simple!

http://www.facebook.com/people/Oho-Ohno/100003389762992 Oho Ohno

That isn’t free, it creates extra load. Somebody pays for it.

Neon Frank

Yep, that’s correct and anyone who taps power lines in this way and gets caught will pay for it in the end

So at what distance are you harmlessly collecting “radiated” power that is for all intents and purposes already lost, as compared to actually putting an electromagnetic load on the line in the near field so to speak and directly harvesting energy? The power company can always use DC if that is a ever a concern.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Oho-Ohno/100003389762992 Oho Ohno

Electromagnetic fields are not “naturally radiated
away” or lost, as soon as you put an inductor with a circuit into the field
you create an additional load. There is no free lunch.

jhewitt123

My only hope is you know more than me and can explain that one advantage to DC power transmission is avoiding the AC power lost naturally to radiation, even @ the low frequency of 60 hz. I understand power lines are not designed to be antennas fortunately. How much it would radiate in a vacuum for example, I wouldn’t know but even components of the atmosphere, while not the dense electrical iron we would think of in a transformer coil are not completely independent and isolated.

http://www.facebook.com/tito.john.73 Tito John

DC transmission lines also have an associated magnetic field; the advantage of DC is that the fields are not constantly expanding and collapsing and therefore don’t induce electrical currents in nearby conductors — like the earth. That induction is indeed, as Ohio Ohno said, an additional load that does sap power. Energy has to be conserved; there’s no free lunch.

The advantage of DC transmission is in avoiding those induction losses, but there’s another problem: by Ohm’s law, power is the current squared times the resistance of the transmission line. To minimize those resistance losses, you can increase the voltage of the line, and the power lost to resistance drops as the square of the drop in current.
It’s easy enough to increase the voltage on an AC transmission line; transformers will do the trick. Two loops in the secondary winding for every loop in the primary winding and you’ve doubled the voltage.
Stepping up and down DC power is a lot more expensive and complicated, but there’s a point where the tradeoffs become worthwhile. The ultimate goal is to minimize transmission losses: One tradeoff is line resistance (higher voltage helps); another is induction losses (DC is better than AC); another is the relative cost of stepping up and stepping down the voltage being carried (simple AC transformers vs. what you need to do the same with DC). At some point the stars align and DC is the better choice.

Clinton Hall

Dude, this is old tech, what he is doing is illegal. He is not harnessing the natural electromagnetism created by the planets core. No, he is drawing it away from other power sources witch increase the load of that device and thus increases the power drain. It is theft. People have been doing this for over half a century and many have faced stiff fines and even jail time for it. I learned how to do this 20 years ago in my very first EE course. If I caught this guy doing this to my cell phone, I’d beat the ever loving daylight out of him. Those electromagnetic fields created by appliances and electric lines are not wasted or free energy. They are bi products of ac currents and as long as there is not another inductor within the same field, they remain as long as the current is there. Drawing from them, draws more current. I am very sorry you are having such a hard time understanding this. Sounds like what you are saying is that since he is just stealing such a small amount of electricity, it’s no big deal. Wish you were my neighbor, I’d love to set up a nice mutual inductance system, maybe off your air conditioner and steal about $20 a month from you. No biggie though… right?

http://laird.zchs.org/ G. Fisher

How many radios would have to tune in a station to shut it down?

corkie

There’s a difference between a company that’s radiating a signal and a company that’s transmitting energy via cables. The energy that’s being deliberately radiated is free for you to use and nobody will care (even though you won’t get much energy from it) unless you get too close to the transmitting antenna (in which case, an inductive load will negatively affect their transmission). Putting an inductive load close to cables that are being used to efficiently transfer electrical energy will reduce the amount of energy reaching the source. It is theft.

pridisc

If power lines are radiating energy into an area that belongs to you then I don’t think the power company can sue you. I guess an argument can be made that the power company should use its own property for transmission and that one is free to capture all energy available in a place one owns. In fact you could sue the power company for radiating potentially harmful energy into your premises.

AlwaysPrepared

Wrong. If you could only manage to capture what is radiated without creating additional load, you would be right. But induction creates additional load, which means you are using energy you aren’t paying for. Many people have been caught doing this over the years. How were they caught? Simple: the power company was measuring power loss they could not explain. If it was insignificant or non-existent loss, they wouldn’t have noticed.

pridisc

What specifically about *MY* comment are you calling wrong?

pridisc

1. You have not understood my comment (the one to which you have replied). Read it again. You are trying to counter an argument that has not made.

2. Anyway, the argument you make is also not very sound. How much load did those people manage to create by capturing radiated electricity? What equipment did they use?

“Many people have been caught doing this over the years.” You mean they were capturing radiated energy and not using a wire or a piece of metal to tap into the main line? I highly doubt this happened, especially since you say “many people”. There could be a few nerds doing this but not many people. Also the captured energy would be too less. considering that the coil can’t be brought very close to the wire as it would arouse suspicion.

Please share your links.

Clinton Hall

Prudisc, AlwaysPrepared is 100% correct! The power companies do monitor and prosecute people for stealing electricity through mutual inductance all the time!!! The electromagnetic field created by the power lines is not “radiated” and lost but is static. The laws in the united states are very clear concerning this type of theft. Many have faced stiff fines and even jail time for doing it. Please do your homework before making such ridicules post that make you look stupid.

pridisc

Please share a link to the source. I had asked you the same thing last time as well. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong else you are the one who needs to do the homework.
Meanwhile here are my links:

I hate to agree with you because you are rude as hell, but you’re pretty much 100% right. I used to work in data telemetry for a power interconnection company that monitored the hundreds of power companies across the entire east coast of the US. When I was there, data would come in from every substation in the upper east coast approx every 10 mins(and they were in the process of implementing a 5 second ‘data collector’.) They would monitor everything that could affect the load output from cold temperatures to lightening storms. They absolutely can accurately monitor the expected load vs the actual load. Despite this there is always a percent error between actual and expected. Something like siphoning a AA battery throughout the course of a day would go completely unnoticed and the load added by the AA battery would be basically negligible, but something like powering the appliances in an ‘off-the-grid’, summer log cabin would most likely be noticed.

kyle

such small power that any application is practically pointless.

Guest

Who are you Monsanto? The free electrons thrown off of an energized line are no longer owned by the transmission company, any more than the further hybridized seed from a crop initially grown from GMO seeds from Monsanto is forever owned by Monsanto.

Raineer

Free electrons? I don’t think you quite grasp the subject matter. Electrons aren’t passed outside the wires, at least not beyond the quantum effect which is nanometers away. This is the creation of magnetic fields, but using those magnetic fields to create electricity again does create more loads inside the wires. You may consider it negligible, but try to power enough devices off that and the transmission company will notice and it will be viewed as a version of theft.

http://www.facebook.com/Adrian.Ke Adrian Ke Chongyang

Who are you, a B-grade movie maker? “Free electrons thrown off a energized line?” Too much Star Trek technobabble, dude.

corkie

Sorry, Guest, but you’re not correct. Putting an inductive load next to a transmission line is theft.

AlwaysPrepared

You are right about Monsanto seeds, but dead wrong about this power discussion. I suggest you do some serious reading or get an electrical engineering degree before pursuing such a conversation again. :)

http://www.facebook.com/aemilius.aetius Aemilius Aetius

I don’t see any problem if those greedy corporations are the ones paying for it. This is the only way they are going to stop poisoning with radiation and move to more efficient technologies.

Magnus Blomberg

What technologies are you refering to?

Powerlines are very efficient as far as power transmission go.

postwick

does it create extra load? it doesn’t sound like it does. say you found a way to convert automobile tailpipe emissions into electrical energy – would doing so cause the auto to have to work harder? no, you’re just making use of already-produced, but wasted, energy.

Raineer

It absolutely creates extra load. Using the magnetic field given off by charge moving through a wire is the same way a motor works.

http://www.facebook.com/Adrian.Ke Adrian Ke Chongyang

If it relied on converting the energy stored in the pressure of the emissions, yes it would actually cause the auto to work harder. Backpressure from emission systems make internal combustion engines lose efficiency.

David McGuckin

90% of power is lost in the lines anyway.

http://laird.zchs.org/ G. Fisher

Nah; it just converts waste energy which would otherwise be absorbed by the environment and turned to heat.

Magnus Blomberg

No the naturally wasted energy will be the same and the extra load of the device will be added. There is no free lunch! If there was why not build a powerplant from just a wire and a coil? Seed the circuit with one amp and it would just amplify itself to infinity right?

http://laird.zchs.org/ G. Fisher

Nope, energy can be neither created nor destroyed. But casting a shadow doesn’t cause me to overtax a light bulb.

Magnus Blomberg

It is not the same thing. Youre example is like harwesting the kinetic energy of a bullit shot from a rifle. the bullit is no longer connected to the rifle. A device harvesting energy from the magnetic fields of a powerline IS connected through the fields to the powerline and the powerplant.

Clint Sharp

Shut up you frigging dream ruiner.

Clint Sharp

And my lunch is free if I take it from you. I drink your milk shake! I drink it up!

geniusthemaster

allow me to trow you all in the dirt. yet again. heat is the product of pressure and friction. theres asstons of it at the capacitors “SO?!?”

hey geniuses. theres enough free energy being SHOVED to the outer edges of the wires into OPEN AIR to power 3 tvs FOR FREE in between every set of poles with even 1 capacitor.

the electric company(ancient technology name here) gains REDUCED MAINTENANCE for life. and people can keep their cellphones and magnetic drive batteries ♪♫ charged

oh btw the future has been sneaking in super targeted information to people inside rtf files. from secondlife – the worlds best and most hackable game with infinite possibilities. the future of the internet is inside secondlife. go now.

end of line.

Scott

That exactly what I scrolled down here to say.

Victor Zimmer

Just like transport companies get pissed of when someone follow their trucks and suck up the exhaust!

http://www.facebook.com/august.v.osch August Van Osch

Mythbusters did something similar a few years ago, they concluded the energy was too minute for their purposes. I would like to see the product aimed at capturing background cosmic radiation, and the plans public with a form factor that can be created with a home 3d printer, just add rectifiers antennas and whatever crystal oscillator works, I think. Even if it took $1,000 to make 1 watt it could run non-stop for decades.

Anyone look into crystal radios which need no batteries or mains power to run an earphone?

The best I can find about the Karpen cell is that after a long period of time it’s still capable of prividing a working electromotive force. That doesn’t mean it was providing power to do work over that time period.

My
dear Nikola Tesla, you have been vindicated again, and again. From you
concept of mobile communications to free global electricity direct from
nature…. And yet my heart bleeds for you still for what they have
done to you….

postwick

this isn’t free global electricity from nature. this is using the emissions of manmade power plants and other devices.

http://twitter.com/rwerkh Richard Werkhoven

Yes and as such it is just stealing power.

It will reduce the signal from those transmitters.

If everyone gets one of these then the sources have to increase their output.

Potentially it just means we get higher doses from the sources.

postwick

it seems like it’s just “waste” electromagnetic fields. this energy would be emitted whether anyone created a device to convert it or not, wouldn’t it?

http://www.facebook.com/claude.denn Claude Denn

We have to look at how the field is created…AC Electricty is a natural phenom? Right? Now Mr. Tesla found out this fact at university, the earth has a molton metallic core that is rotating? Correct? In physic this is how a natuarly occurring magnetic field. This is why he built Warrencliffe, or better yet explain how he lit the World’s Fair in Chicago. I am willing to pay money just to see some artifacts from there. Magnetic fields and static electricty occur naturally and can be harvested, but big power aka JP Morgan had squashed the concept of free electricty. Please read the trial transcripts and all other documents and publications on Nikola Tesla.

Magnus Blomberg

The load of the device is added to the energy wasted. The powerdraw at the plant would increase.

DM

No, Magnus, that doesn’t make sense. Sorry. It’s very simple: if you are capturing a user’s waste product, you are not affecting the user’s production system. If you capture more than the waste, then you would add to the load.

Magnus Blomberg

Let me try to make an analogy. It’s the same as when you ride a bike. The wheels are turning and load is put on you by the air resistance against the spokes. If you add a dynamo to the pinning wheel you will increase the load on you.

I think that the reason that so many posters here can not see that harwesting energy from the fields around power lines is putti g load on the powerplant is because that they do not see that the harvesting device is coupled to the powerplant through the electromagnetic field and powerline.

If this was not true. Why not build a harvester that feeds the electricity back into the powerline and get a loop that creates infinite energy?

DM

Because – and assuming the hypothetical, as the amounts are far to small – it would not be an infinite energy loop, it is not a closed system in that sense.

DM

Because – and assuming the hypothetical, as the amounts are far to small – it would not be an infinite energy loop, it is not a closed system in that sense.

Magnus Blomberg

How about a transformer then. The primary coil is a powerline that happens to be wrapped around a lot of times. The secondary coil is in fact an “energy harvester”

Are you telling me that the load the primary coil does not increase when putting load on the secondary coil?

DM

You’re straying from the subject, but if a transformer increased the load on the primary coil, it would not be very useful, would it?

Magnus Blomberg

Well the purpose of the transformer is to transform the voltage and not to create energy out of nothing. So I would say the transformer would be useful for its intended purpose namly transforming voltage.

No I im not straying of topic since induction is at the heart of both “energy harvesting” and transformation.

Magnus Blomberg

Well the purpose of the transformer is to transform the voltage and not to create energy out of nothing. So I would say the transformer would be useful for its intended purpose namly transforming voltage.

No I im not straying of topic since induction is at the heart of both “energy harvesting” and transformation.

This a completely different thing. As the headline states it is about harvesting kinetic energy and not “wast enegy from radiated from powerlines” There is no waste energy radiated. There is a field generated. A field and radiation is not the same thing!

AlwaysPrepared

Precisely. The field is potential electricity, not actual electricity. These people simply don’t understand electrical transmission and the fields generated. They view this as a water company pipe that leaks. If the water company knows it leaks but determines it is not cost-effective to repair the leak, then someone who comes along with a bucket to capture the water is indeed capturing waste. This talk of capturing power from power lines is more like taking water from taps on the water pipe. Just because the water CAN come from the tap does not make it waste water.

Magnus Blomberg

No the creation of the field is not what wasts the energy. It is the interaction with the field that can extract energy and thereby increase the load on the powerplant.

It’s like when you ride your bike. The wheels are turning and they interact with surraounding air creating some air resistance. As long as you peddel the wheels will turn and there will be som energy wasted due to the interactions between wheels and air. If someone adds a dynamo toyour front wheel to harvest energy it will put additional load on you.

Remember that a magnetic field is not radiation. Interacting with a field will affect what ever is creating the field. Absorbing radiation on the other hand does not affect the source since that interaction was done in the instant that the radiation left the source.

postwick

Ahh now I understand. Thank you for the thorough explanation, the radiation analogy is perfect – as that’s exactly how I thought magnetic fields worked. I know magnetic fields aren’t radiation, but I thought they were “decoupled” from the source after generation, like radiation.

Magnus Blomberg

No the creation of the field is not what wasts the energy. It is the interaction with the field that can extract energy and thereby increase the load on the powerplant.

It’s like when you ride your bike. The wheels are turning and they interact with surraounding air creating some air resistance. As long as you peddel the wheels will turn and there will be som energy wasted due to the interactions between wheels and air. If someone adds a dynamo toyour front wheel to harvest energy it will put additional load on you.

Remember that a magnetic field is not radiation. Interacting with a field will affect what ever is creating the field. Absorbing radiation on the other hand does not affect the source since that interaction was done in the instant that the radiation left the source.

http://www.facebook.com/shaka.kasenzangakhona Shaka KaSenzangakhona

Actually the power comes from the Earths electromagnetic field. There is a video online of a NASA satellite extending a copper coil in orbit that was generating so much power that it eventually broke because of the heat create by the power produced. Theory goes the higher in altitude you go the more power you pull. Since the power comes from the Earth and has always been there as far as humans are concerned it is free. I would have posted the youtube link to the video, but it was taken down, hence removed from my fav list. I sure any of you can find it.

Magnus Blomberg

Sure you can create an electric current in a coil on a satellite that passes through the earth’s electromagnetic field but where does that energy come from? It comes from tha fact that the coil will put drag (not airodynamic drag) on the satelite causing it to decelerate until it deorbits or untill it is in a geostationary orbit , not moving through the electromagnetic field and therefore not producing any electricity.

DM

I have a feeling that the energy involved in the NASA experiment, the electro-magnetic radiation from the earth, is part of the leftover from the big bang – isn’t that the root of the earth’s magnetic field?

Magnus Blomberg

The earths magnetic field is generated by the motion of molten iron alloys in the Earth’s outer core.

A field is not the same thing as radiation. You can absorb or reflect radiation but when interacting with a field you are subject to a force.

Leftover radiation from the big bang or background radiation is extremely weak. All radio signals sent must be so strong that when they reach a reciever they are still stronger then the ever present background radiation and other kinds of intergerence or the sinal is unreadable. So even the faint signals of your mobile phone is many times stronger.

Therefore bacground radiation from the big bang is not a viable power source.

Magnus Blomberg

The earths magnetic field is generated by the motion of molten iron alloys in the Earth’s outer core.

A field is not the same thing as radiation. You can absorb or reflect radiation but when interacting with a field you are subject to a force.

Leftover radiation from the big bang or background radiation is extremely weak. All radio signals sent must be so strong that when they reach a reciever they are still stronger then the ever present background radiation and other kinds of intergerence or the sinal is unreadable. So even the faint signals of your mobile phone is many times stronger.

Therefore bacground radiation from the big bang is not a viable power source.

http://www.facebook.com/Hippynz Lance McC

have these in smartphones to trickle charge the phone to extend the time between charges from the wall

Stahr Meridian Power

The bigger concern should be the fact that EMF’s are harmful to eveyone and people should protect themselves from it. Check this out.. http://www.StahrMeridianPower.com
This product helps protect you and your family.

Neutrino .

Save me the trouble of clicking on the link and just tell me…

Is it a tinfoil hat by any chance?

http://www.facebook.com/Sylve5ter Sly Cooper

People who bought this also bought: Chicken soup for the Chem-trail laden soul.

That is one nagging concern that is already raised by the prospect of more and more wifis and cells and bluetooth devices all around.

Stahr Meridian Power

The bigger concern should be the fact that EMF’s are harmful to eveyone and people should protect themselves from it. Check this out.. http://www.StahrMeridianPower.com
This product helps protect you and your family.

not on the cars, but how about on the walls of freeways? thousands of tiny little windmills. the air is moving from the cars anyway…why not capture some of that energy that is being wasted?

http://www.facebook.com/DraeMan1 Andrae Smith

That is actually a really clever idea!

wtphuckdisisstupid

Sigh. It is not. You guys remind me of my older brother. For two years, he would call me up with some kind of “invention” he had involving generation of “free” energy. He never studied physics, not even basic physics, and if he had, he would have realized how ridiculous he sounded. Each time I would say, “That won’t work.” He kept pushing. I would say, “Go read a friggin’ Wikipedia article!!: You’re driving me crazy with this non-sense!!!” Still, he kept at it.

There is a fundamental fact of physics that no amount of creativity will circumvent:

There is no free lunch. Or, “Conservation of Energy.”

If you do anything to try to collect the “free flow of air”, the extra resistance created by the “windmills” will change the environment causing increased air-resistance on the automobile, causing driver to spend more on gas. It would be like putting a little wind-turbine at the exit of the muffler to capture the “puff-puffs”, It won’t work.

You CAN have situation where you collect energy from elements that are decoupled from source that expended it, like slowing down a bullet that has already been shot. But you cannot get something for nothing. The windmill-on-highway thing is more something-for-nothing than not.

http://www.facebook.com/Adrian.Ke Adrian Ke Chongyang

Actually a properly designed small wall windmill would be capturing energy that simply dissipates into heating up the walls or changes into sound when it comes into friction with the freeway walls. Energy conservation is not violated.

Your nick is highly appropriate only for your own post.

wtphuckdisisstupid

You’re dense.

If you place such “properly designed” windmills against a wall, WITHOUT any cars, the windmills would STILL turn due to random flow of air that exists in the atmosphere due to the sun.

But let us say that the air is PERFECTLY STILL.

Now here comes a car.

In the total absence of of such random flows of air, meaning there is only flow collected by the windmills due to passing cars, such windmills would change the distribution of particles in the medium, in this case air, as a function of time, or technically speaking, if you were to take the divergence (look it up) of the pressure field of air all around the car, you would find that the divergence of the medium different when the windmills are present versus when they are absent. Intuitively, the pressure gradient would change so that the drop from the surface of the passing car to wherever the windmills are will not be as steep. Pressure between the two would rise, windmills would turn, but the friction on the car would increase.

That’s why I used the word “decoupled” above.

An analogy would be placing a small fan in front of the AC vent in your house with an electric generator attached to it, then feeding the “gained” electricity back into your house to help with your electricity bill. What you will discover at the end of the month after looking at your bill is that nothing has really changed. The reason is that that fan interferes with the flow of air from the vent, disturbing the air field, causing the motor that drives the air coming out of the vent to work harder, thus negating any “gain” that you thought you got with the extra fan.

It’s called a closed system, and it contains feedback.

postwick

so you’re telling me that if you have a tiny windmill 100 feet from the road, the air is perfectly still everywhere (for the sake of argument, not reality of course), the car pushing through the air moves the air, and some amount of time later (after the car is long gone) the air moves the windmill…it is slowing down the car (or making it use more energy to go the same speed)?

nonsense.

the car is imparting energy to the air, the windmill is taking it back out. regardless of the existence of the windmill or not, the car is still imparting the same amount of energy to the air around it.

wtphuckdisisstupid

What happens if we keep everything the same in your experiment, but use the following distances.

1. 100 feet (like you said)
2. 10 feet
3. 1 foot
4. 1 inch

At which distance does the windmill no-longer interferes pressure gradient that surrounds the moving car?

Jay Eva

The fact is I was almost sucked into the development of a windmill on the sides of the roadways to generate current for variable message displays about 15 years ago. The issue is that phuck is correct. Adding windmills to the sides of the roadways to turn the pressure waves of passing vehicles into electricity means that more gasoline is consumed due to higher air resistance created by the air coming in contact with the blades of the windmill. The air in front of a moving vehicle can’t move out of the way of the vehicle faster than the flow of the vehicle through the air. This creates a pressure wave which creates wind as air rushes away from the vehicle and air rushes into the vacuum it created. The problem is that the amount of gasoline consumed is directly proportional to the amount of electricity produced. So by moving the windmill closer to the roadway you’ll give the air less room to move around the vehicle and this will create more air pressure in front of the vehicle cause more gasoline to be consumed to push the vehicle against the greater resistance. As you move the windmill away from the roadway you decrease the amount of air resistance you decrease the amount of gasoline consumed and you decrease the amount of electricity produced. Eventually you can get far enough away so that the amount of gasoline is negligible as is the amount of wind produced by passing vehicles. You can’t have it both ways. There is ONE possible solution to this though. There are locations where applying increased air pressure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, on off ramps where vehicles are braking but will allow their momentum to continue to pull them forward and they are not accelerating. In such locations (which are few) such a turbine would work.

wtphuckdisisstupid

Very well explained, Jay Eva. Allow me to add that the last part of your analysis, is, of course, correct. If anyone reading this is wondering, “Why is it OK to violate Law of Conservation of Energy on off-ramp using windmills, but not on straight road?” The answer is, “You’re not.” When you put the windmills on off-ramp, you do collect energy, and there is resistance, but if you measure the heat emitted by the braking system with and without the little windmills present, you will find that the brakes do not emit as much heat when the windmills are present. Physics rules. :)

I would also like to say that those of you who have an interest in energy, but never took physics, should spend an hour on Wikipedia studying the concept of force, distance, energy, and power; paying particular attention to the law of conservation of energy.

This is an area where once you get it, you get it, and from simple principle, you can go through 100,000 proposals of various types of energy-generating machines, and be able to tell, almost immediately, whether they would work or not.

You would be surprised at how often educated people propose perpetual-motion machine to me, at which point I spend ridiculous amounts of time, in some cases MONTHS!!! (my own brother), trying to convince him that the idea is absurd and will never work. Such people, for some inexplicable reason, refuse to spend just 1 hour on Wikipedia.

abcdefgqwerty

So you think that we will never find any way around that law of conservation of energy through quantum mechanics or any other possibilities? To somehow get free energy?

wtphuckdisisstupid

Not in this universe. Anyone who does that, becomes a god, because he would be able to make a machine (theoretically) that destroys parts of the universe at will.

* Standing on the railroad tracks, holding my arm in the air — for 24 HOURS — to charge ONE AA battery.

Sign me up!

http://www.facebook.com/Sylve5ter Sly Cooper

It’s an inductor. Therefore a load. The energy isn’t coming from e pollution, it’s coming from the fucking power-line…

And sure, stick it in front of your wifi router, be rewarded with a massive dead spot. Just your fridge is enough to create a dead-spot larger than itself through dissipation.

http://www.facebook.com/diegutefee Christian Holata

It strikes me how technically illiterate you have to be in order to write about electromagnetic induction as an “extreme Tech”?

Rusty Nails

It’s great to see a device like this in the news; however, when will people wake up to the contributions of Nikola Tesla? It’s time to release 100+ years of suppressed technology. Tesla’s patents stand for themselves, along with all those who followed in his footsteps.

this radiation is poisoning nature anyway why shouldnt we be allowed to use it ??? whoever says “it isnt free” yeah those around it are paying with their health

no.name

Why couldn’t he go even further and use the electromagnetic energy of the giant magneto called planet Earth….Tesla style.

David

Talk about low standards.. This guy is a digital media graduate. The reason why he hasn’t run to the patent office is because all he put together was a box with a light on it. He ran around holding it to things and turning the light on. This must be the most naive article i’ve seen in a long time.

http://www.facebook.com/people/John-Nakoulidis/100003351837661 John Nakoulidis

Nikola Tesla!!!!!!

http://www.facebook.com/richard.souter.56 Richard Souter

Is it just me … Really is the same as just connecting a couple of wires up to the device / source. You use the device near your kettle at home, for example, if you measure the current drawn by the kettle it will have increased. Due to the losses of transmitting through the air you would have been better off buying a plug adapter and plugging in a charger.

Whilst, legally, it would be difficult to charge one person using a device in public … What happens when thousands use them ? The answer is everyones electricity bill goes up.

The power does not come from nowhere, it comes from the electricity companies … And their shareholders will end up with the same money.

BTW, not exactly new …. If you are of my age you will remember making a crystal radio as a kid, no battery needed :)

http://twitter.com/MatsSvensson Mats Svensson

And what about all the free corduroy energy?

Hey baby , wanna charge your phone, right here?
*points*

http://www.facebook.com/paul.getson Paul Getson

Probably few of you have actually built a crystal radio. No battery. An antenna wire, a capacitor (or tuned capacitor) a diode and earphones. You can tune in to an AM radio station and listen. There is power produced in the circuit. Ramp that up and you could power the world from electromagnetic energy coming from the sun and/or the stars.

wtphuckdisisstupid

I have built a “fox-hole” radio. I’m also a E.E., and I can tell you..this so-called “invention” is very misleading. The amount of energy that can be “harvested” is directly proportional to the surface area of the harvester but inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. If you are a physicist or a E.E.,you are already aware of the Poynting vector: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector

In any case, as far as harvesting energy from the sun, your inductor must be tuned to the individual modes of the flux, and since much of it is white, you’re talking about a device with practically infinite number of modes. You might as well use energy-band device (solar panel).

abcdefgqwerty

Most of us are not physicist or EE or have any clue what a poynting vector is. So I will take your word for it, but for the average person its hard to know why this cant happen because its pretty complicated

http://www.facebook.com/leslie.andrea.79 Leslie Andrea

awesome!

http://www.facebook.com/atroli Adam Troli

We would definitely need more information about the device and it’s electrical components that make it up. Tito John and Oho Ono said it best, there is no “free lunch”. Ohm’s Law and the explanation of transformers was a good start but we must remember the law of conservation of energy.

Power is directly proportionate to the current and voltage, so in a perfect world, power developed in the secondary coil of a transformer would be the same as the power developed in the primary regardless of how the electrical current was produced. Faraday’s Law explains it well; “Nothing gained, nothing lost”, however there is still some loss…

AC circuits have an associated magnetic field because their fields are constantly expanding and collapsing and are therefore induced in nearby conductors because the flux in the conductor changes. The only real loss is HEAT loss from the charged particles (usually between the charged electrons and atomic ions of the conductor). In an electric circuit these charged particles are accelerated by the electric field and give up some of their kinetic energy when colliding with ions through vibrations that give off heat. You see this in electrical heaters.

So without becoming an extra load on the circuit, the only real “by product” to harvest would be the tiny amounts of heat given off on a sub atomic level which are so small in relation to the amount of coil turns (hundreds of thousands), of a simple step down transformer used by your local power company for example.

The crystal radio is pretty much an antenna attached to the secondary side of a transformer where the radio station is the primary side. The antenna converts the electro magnetic radio waves into an ac currents that hit’s the tuning coil which is connected to the capacitor and diode which rectifies the current. This means the semi conductor crystal allows only the positive part of the wave to pass through the circuit and the capacitor levels it out by not discharging before the next positive part of the sine wave passes amplifying your signal. Still there is no “free power by product” just the original power emitted by the station with a hell of a lot of dissipation lol What your hearing was originally broadcasted from an extremely powerful broadcasting station and what your picking up can be measured it micro or nano watts. Even by matching the station impedance and having your radio perfectly tuned, you still need a power source for amplification

I think we can forget about the harvesting the coffee machine…

http://www.facebook.com/cj.miller.3154 Cj Miller

This is a worthless article. It shouldn’t of even been wrote. This is not new technology, it is a smaller, useless version of a Power-mat. Thank you for letting me read about induction, not reading about sucking energy out of the air.

this is the same technology that Nicola Tesla was trying to give to the world with wireless power. its been around forever. as to power. Company going after you for building a recover not much they can do as you are not. Directly tapping in but
collecting stray energy which is outside the line.

maxwell zeta

My
dear Nikola Tesla thanks for the frankestain movie

lawabidingcitizen

Farmers used to do this with the power lines running through their land. now you go to prison if you’re caught. It’s nothing new. been around for a long time.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=589279993 Bonita Poulin

We get charged for dirty electricty lost from transmission lines here in Ontario, so why not harvest it!

wtphuckdisisstupid

Actually, if you created a “harvester” that some how “harvested” (dirty) electricity, you would actually increase the load on the thing (power generator) this creating the dirty electricity. It would confuse the computers, which would say, “Hmm…that’s odd…someone seems to be stealing electricity from us.”

Andres Estopinan

Nikola Tesla figured this out almost 100 years ago. Supposedly the generator he devised could be made by virtually anyone.But for “some reason,” his discovery wasn’t publicized. Until recently, that is. It’s quite an interesting read.

People really underestimate how smart people were a long time ago. Most of the most important discoveries we rely on today in tons of things came from the stuff those guys figured out. Physics, math, and so on.

http://www.facebook.com/Adrian.Ke Adrian Ke Chongyang

It would actually be very plausible to be used for a Hollywood movie, being as it is something that 1)actually is real in a vague and tentative way 2)pointlessly ineffective due to massive inefficiency of utility 3)unknown enough to fool the masses who, let’s face it, refused to pay any attention during elementary physics classes.

wtphuckdisisstupid

Since there seems to be a surprising number of people “intrigued” by this, I would like explain what is going on, and why this is nothing to get excited about [sorry].

First of all, everyone knows about conservation of energy, and that this is a fundamental law of nature, right up there with conservation of momentum, and before it is violated, everyone reading this will become a god.

That said, for the electromagnetic thingy described in the article, it will not work. The reason is that there is no free lunch. It’s called mutual induction.

Take common home cooling fan. It has a time-varying electromagnetic field around it. We all know from your high-school electrical engineering courses that, if you have a magnetic field that is time-varying, then if you put a coil in that field, you get a resulting, time-varying voltage to appear at the ends of the coils. Thrown in a diode in series with the coil, and there you have it – DC-like electro-motive force that tends to induce current to travel in one direction.

The problem with this is that it does not give you “free energy”. The moment you introduce the coil into that field, you also interfere with whatever is creating the field – you slow the fan down.

Think about it: If this fact where not true, you could add more, and more, and more coils, with the number of turns in the millions, which, doing math

Integral{E*dl] = -d/dt (B * dA) (for you nerds)…

…you would would be able to use one home fan to power and entire neighborhood.

William Carr

You’re entirely wrong, of course.

We’re talking about capturing wasted energy from power line EM. It’s no particular strain to pick that up, store it briefly in a capacitor, and then feed it to a battery.

You’re describing Conservation of Energy, which is good, but you overlook the fact that energy is being wasted all the time.

It’s like recharging your iPad at night with a solar cell lying in the light from your neighbor’s outdoor light.

wtphuckdisisstupid

Idiot. I have a degree in electrical engineering. I actually studied electrodynamics.

Do you realize how much so-called “wasted” energy is emitted? According to these crack-pots, it is a lot. Well, think about a power plant. Look at all that “wasted” energy. Why is it that power plants do not use this same technique right at the power-plant to “capture” the energy that, according to you, is being lost? It is because you cannot put any type of energy-collecting device near the element that is generating the changing B-field without interfering with the current that is generating the B-field. The presence of the collector, which is a coil, creates mutual inductance. It DOES affect the current in the power-line. The only thing that this German student is doing is leeching, and the leeching is small.

It would take me literally 10 minutes to draw on a piece of paper what this guy did. As article points out, it is nothing more than coil with rectifying diodes, where resonant frequency of LC network is tuned to main frequency in emitted radiation. Also, the amount of energy “harvested” is so small, that this thing is useless.

It is NOT useless if you have a machine, designed by real electrical engineers, where you transfer power over a short gap.

And if you are still not convinced, ask yourself what would happen if he made the number of turns in his “invention” 1,000,000, since the amount of energy generated is directly proportional to the surface area of one circle of coil, and therefore to # of coils? That’s right, he’d have enough to power an entire factor. But we know that does not happen. Why? Because long before he got anywhere even close to something that could make an ant fart, the coils would load the power-lines, and that would be the end of that.

This is the problem with our society. No one wants to do their homework, and so when we all become adults, crackpots give millions of dollars to ridiculous ideas that 20-year-old can easily see is stupid.

abcdefgqwerty

A lot of people dont know as much as you do about most of this. Me included

wtphuckdisisstupid

I would like to apologize to William Carr and anyone else who is reading this. If re-read what I wrote, and realized I could have been a lot less hawkish. :) It’s my brothers and my friends…especially one of them..they constantly propose ideas like this..but if I try to explain to them even basic physics, so that they could stop proposing…lol…they won’t even let me finish a sentence. So over a period of years, it gets a little frustrating. :)

My sincere apologies.

jimmy37

So how is this different than Tesla’s and other’s work, and why is it newsworthy when others have done the same?

My crystal radio set that I built as a kid ran on radio waves. No batteries needed.

The larger the antennae, the more power you can “harvest”. It would be useful if it could autotune to grab the most power.

http://twitter.com/_jumpjack_ jumping jack flash

Somewhere that “free wasted” energy come from; if you pick it up, it must be replaced. So somebody will eventually pay for your “free” energy.

William Carr

No, electricity goes to waste from power lines all the time.

Ray

Hi,

This is easy to do. The heart is in the antenna and the brains are in a fast full-wave bridge rectifier. Basically, it’s a rectenna.

Make a fast full-wave bridge rectifier using four fast diodes, like FD700 diodes.Connect a low-leakage capacitor, like a Mylar, across the outputs of the rectifier, to store the direct current. This capacitor can then be discharged across a light-emitting-diode, LED, causing it to flash, or a rechargeable battery, causing it to slowly recharge.

The antenna input to the rectifier is the key. Larger antennas will gather more electrical energy. Antennas can also be placed in parallel making them larger. You’ll want to make a long, flat antenna, in order to collect long-wave and short-wave electrical energy. Use a wide ribbon, made conductive by soaking in silver or graphite ink. Real
India ink should be made of graphite. The ribbon antennas can be raised by using helium filled balloons. Again, the ribbons can be in parallel, to make them wider. DO NOT let the conductive ribbons contact any overhead power wires!

Please experiment carefully!

Try this too.

How Our World Can Use 50% Less Watt-hours of Electricity:

Here’s a new concept of reducing the Watt-hours used by 50%, by doubling the
electricity’s frequency, using a variable frequency drive in series with a diode, to power various devices.

If an electric clock is powered at twice its frequency, then it will run twice as fast. If the power is half-wave rectified, then it will run on time using half of the Watt-hours.

This works!

It electronically quickly turns the power ON and OFF. The power is switched OFF 50% of the time. The Watt-hours used are reduced by 50%. The frequency must be doubled to make the ON and OFF cycle quickenough. For example: 60 Hertz power has 120 ON pulses (or half-cycles) per second. Therefore 120 Hertz, half-wave rectified, is needed to have 120 ON pulses and 120 OFF pulses per second. This results in a 50% reduction of the Watt-hours used. Please try it using an incandescent light bulb.

It can be easily empirically tested by obtaining an appropriate variable frequency drive and diodes.

The ON and OFF cycle will not be visually perceived in lighting for the same reason that flicker is not perceived in animation.

If 50 or 60 Hertz is half-wave rectified, the light will glow brown, but you will be using 50% less Watt-hours of electricity. As you increase the frequency, the light will get brighter and brighter, still using 50% less Watt-hours of electricity. Eventually you will not see any difference in the light’s brightness and you will still be using 50%
less Watt-hours of electricity.

A light pulsed quickly enough will not seem to be pulsed, but it will use 50% less Watt-hours of electricity.

It will not be cheap, but it can be done slowly, over time, by the utility.

Double the electricity’s frequency after the neighborhood’s step-down transformer and then half-wave rectify it in the drop wires to the consumer. You will be using 50% less Watt-hours of electricity, much less fossil fuels and pollution.

It’s a win/win solution for everyone!

Let’s make this concept happen!

Thanks,

Ray

FactsAreFun

Wow… Ray… how about getting some education about electricity, first, before posting such nonsense?

:-)

KoolKidsKlub

Lol the dog’s just like “Wuuut”

FactsAreFun

Yep… well…

a) It doesn’t work, unless you put it in your microwave.
b) It is illegal.

How_delightful

In the UK it is illegal to get any electricity for `free` if you tap into it near power lines by physical or other connection.
Case in point; it was discovered 25 years ago that neon tube lighting glows near power lines; so some people installed them in their homes where they lived near power lines; but they were forced to stop that due to the law.

There again, in that mental land, farmers can be fined and/or jailed for collecting rainwater on their land to save for their animals in summer for drinking. The UK rivers authority successfully prosecuted a farmer for tens of thousands of dollars because the water-board said that rainwater would have gone into their river and the farmer was depriving them of using it.

Crayzee country.

DM

It’s not the UK, but England, to be specific. The land that invented capitalism, Manchester-style, always seems to be the first to commodify everything – labor, housing, natural resources, government. We have not yet begun to fathom the depths of misery that privatization has left in its wake. The English gave us the false ideology of privatizing not just government services, but even roads, as well as airspace. It’s not surprising to hear that they claim water from the sky as well. The illogic of the case you cite is pathetically obvious but the ideology remains strong.

http://laird.zchs.org/ G. Fisher

We used to build radios which included a powered stage and a separate tunable crystal radio stage. The crystal radio stage was used to tune in a strong local station; the output of this was then rectified and the resulting DC used to power the other stage. In principle Siegel’s device is an untuned version of the same thing.

John

Some people may want to consider that scientific “laws” may not always be permanent. In the past there have been “discoveries” made that have completely changed the understandings of science. It is possible that there may indeed some day be a “free lunch”. Don’t forget that these “laws” are only hypothesis (like all of science) and until they are proven wrong, they will be accepted as truth. As important as these laws may often be, they may also impose a limit to the progress and potential of science.

If someone does some day discover “free energy”, it will likely not be accepted at first (or at all) because of the “no free lunch” law, and the economic downfall of such technology would require for it to be suppressed or maybe gradually implemented as to not shock the world’s economies. Perhaps it already exists.

Maybe we can harvest energy from an unlimited source that powers all of life. Who knows? I hope some day that we can all have free lunch.

les

Ho hum….Tesla did this almost 100 years ago, just no one believed him!

Think of this thing hooked up to a Tesla, you could recharge your car in only 100 days.

William Carr

It’s a Joule Thief.

You hook one up to a dying battery, and absorb power for a second, then it’s enough to fire an LED.

Reverse that. Soak up power from an antenna, then fire it into a battery. It would take a long time to charge with only one antenna, but if you printed a thousand antennas onto a sheet of fabric…

http://www.plbg.at/ Franz Plochberger

Very ineresting because:
a) so we can show how much vasted our surroundings are
b) that would be an new energy source – physically clear
c) economically it will cause a source problem, because nobody knows what definitive source and how much is used

Jarrod Baniqued

If he creates a motor powered by electricity plus static…All hail John Galt!

gregge

I’ve heard of people running long lines of wire along fences near high tension power lines to grab some power from the alternating magnetic field. The test on Mythbusters was designed to not work. They made a compact coil of wire and lifted it up close to the power line. Of course it wouldn’t work tapping such a small length of the magnetic field, with a coil not at all optimized. Stretching out a mile or two of wire straight along a high power line would have the best coupling between it and the field.

corners

“including overhead power lines”

Im sure the power companies will sue like the cable companies did about over air transmission.

http://www.theartofdebtguerrillawarfare.com/ Thomas McFreeman

Just shows how much electro-pollution is out there.

Author “The Art of Debt Guerrilla Warfare, how to beat debt
collectors when your back is against the wall.”

Raúl Riesco

The fundamental, phylosofical point here, is that we are living in a microwave.

Bet u free energy

Yeh and the electromagnetic electricity gatherer thatll increase the payments of ur neighbours bills power bills but itll be good if it could take it from a source other than peoples homes or from out of nothing

Bet u free energy

What happened when nikola tesla used wireless electricity this sums up to be a wireless electricity reciever

http://webinfotech.tzo.com/ Chelmsford_Resident

Gathering Electricity from Man Made generated fuel based systems maybe free in being able to do but the energy being taken from is at a cost by the energy’s source from where it is coming from. IE; Power plants. I’m doing research and writing a paper on Myth Busting Free Energy Claims using common sense as facts.

Joab

Dear Sir

am searching for an electrical device which can be use to prevent stealing of electricity, I will be happy if you can get back to me with a solution.
contact of me coche4me@yahoo.ca

Joab

Jack Harkness

Actually you aren’t taking energy away from anything. Just soaking up energy that would normally be wasted. Like how electricity moving thru a wire creates a circling em field around the wire. If u were to put a coil around the wire and pass a current thru it and measure that current b4 and after installing the coil there would be no difference. Your perception of electrical theory is just tragically filtered thru an overzealous capitalist oligarchy. But its not ur fault tho. Its america’s fault. Ever since jp morgan and edison they have been brainwashing you to believe that energy is a commodity to be controlled and profiteered from. And any technology that could change that is crushed. First by the ones to profit most (big electricity, big oil) and then by you (your school, your tv, your government). Do some research. Tesla didnt even need to sap from any artificial source to produce megawatts. Free your mind.

Jack Harkness

As g. Fisher said, jow many radios would have to tune into a station to jam it? The answer is, it doesent work that way. The electricity thru a cable cant be “sapped away” by harnessing its em field. How many people in a big city u think tune into the same station at any given time? Do they need to adjust their broadcast watts when more people are tuned in? How bout wifi networks broadcasted from low power routers? I have seen like 20 people at a time connected to them. Cell towers can often have many more connected to them. There is no current drop because more people are connected. Em energy is vibration. If like 20 people the same distance away from a speaker hear the noise at 20 dB then would 40 people standing at the same distance hear it at 10 dB? Nope.

http://second-amendment.tripod.com/ daveca

THis is pure BS… hes done nothing new. THis is OLD news.

An AA is NOT a battery, proving whomever wrote this pie in the sky trash is totally illiterate in electricity and electronics. That is a CELL, not a battery.

“There are urban legends about people who install coils of wire in their garage, and then suck up large amounts of power from nearby power substations or radio transmitters.”

No, outright lies and conspiracy theories, the field densities are MICROVOLTS/meter and useless.

This balony is “Brave New World” hysteria, watch the movie on Youtube…

Clinton Hall

What he is doing is nothing new. He is using an inductor to transfer electricity from the magnetic field of one source to his battery. This is not “free” electricity. It is theft! It does consume electricity from the other source. As it draws from the magnetic field, the other power source increases current to the appliance or device to compensate. If he uses it on a cell phone, the phones battery is drained faster. If he uses it on an appliance in a home, the appliance increase the draw of electricity thus drawing more current from the power line and increasing that homeowners electric bill. A man here in Texas did this over 15 years ago. He parked an old car under some high voltage power lines behind his house and wrapped it with copper wire turning it into an inductor. He was able to draw enough electricity from it to power his home! He was caught and charged with theft for stealing power from the electric company. This guy tries this crap in the U.S.A. and he would be facing a misdemeanor theft charge.

Atanas Ctonlob

Probably got sued right after this article for “stealing electricity”

Jeremy

Re: Would the power/radio company notice?
No. This has to do with near-field vs far-field. If the device for capturing energy is close to the device which is broadcasting the energy, the result is inductive coupling which causes the broadcasting device to use more energy. If the capturing device is farther away, then it sees the output of the broadcaster, but the broadcaster does not see it. To imagine it, think of our conceptualization of a black hole- if light and matter get close enough, they cannot escape and thus become a part of the black hole. While our devices don’t become forever locked together, the same concept applies in that, when close enough, the two devices become part of the same system and are thus both “aware” of each other.

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